TOMWOLFE at the keyboard

...Indeed, it set some test pilots apart from other test pilots...

...he, on the other hand, was out there, where life was being lived, busy discovering America and writing about it...

...It wasn’t so much morality that was changing at that point, though that would come soon enough...

...It is the same problem, I’ve come to believe, that runs through the whole body of Tom Wolfe’s journalism, and it stands out all the more in me Right Stuff because The Right Stuff is the best thing he has ever done...

...There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests...

...Some of the nicest times are when Pesky Danger rises, and the adrenaline flows, and the whole riot is on, and the shitfire rains from on high-and you discover your set is still on...

...The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test had proven that, certainly...

...Muddy the waters...

...It reminded me a lot of basic mathematical concepts, which even the most gifted teacher can’t really convey on a blackboard because they are so...

...Harper’s magazine had helped matters along in this regard by announcing that me Right Stuff would be published “later this year...

...He ends up with the phrase “the right stuff...

...In Wolfe’s book, Glenn has the least Right Stuff of all the astronauts...

...White...

...Instead, Wolfe ignored it...

...This was a book about events that took place almost 20 years ago, and Wolfe has always been good at digging up past events...

...It,’’ of course, is the Right Stuff...

...sly, cruel and to a large extent undocumented”-E.B...

...He is, in fact, pretty much the opposite: a hard worker who seems to ignore the press, and who has won a reputation for being willing to spend his time on unsexy, no-win issues guaranteed to keep him out of the papers...

...I don’t know, because Wolfe doesn’t tell me, but 1 suspect it’s that Glenn’s good side represents those qualities that the Right Stuff ethos was totally blind to, in fact almost afraid of...

...These articles caused an enormous furor at the time, all of which looks pretty foolish some 16 years later...

...And weren’t there some people out there who genuinely loved for its own sake the art Wolfe ridiculed in The Painted Word...

...What it was they had was hard to pin down exactly, and at least part of the reason was that the test pilots themselves didn’t talk about it...

...the right stuff, himself...

...And, if you think about it, you’ve probably known somebody yourself who had a little of the Right Stuff ethos...

...Did the astronauts’ wives appear on TV to be concerned about their husbands’ new risky adventure...

...Coming to grips with that kind of caveat may be No Fun, but it does matter, and The Right Stuff is a good place to explain why...

...But often they linger...

...that in itself guaranteed a certain measure of success...

...In it there’s a story, first published in 1975, called “The Truest Sport,” in which Wolfe investigates the world of-you guessed it-test pilots...

...no, they didn’t talk about it at all, ever (except to Tom Wolfe-that goes without saying...

...You can’t help getting the sense that Wolfe instinctively felt that questioning his clean concept would have spoiled the fun...

...it’s different it has a little twist to it (Wolfe would never-horror of horrors-print something that might be conventional wisdom)- but at its core it is not a terribly complicated idea...

...Still, what was clear was that Tom Wolfe had all this...

...Or, to take it from the other direction, there’s the case of John Glenn...

...and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuffand could move higher and higher...

...The Wolfe pyrotechnics are there, all right, on glittering display, but something else is missing...

...Tough to define, yes...

...The Clean Idea The central theme in Eke Right Stuff is that there was a quality that set test pilots-from whose ranks the astronauts were drawn-apart from everyone else...

...The Me Decade-we’re all self-absorbed in the 1970s...

...well, then that man over in the third row might get up and go to the men’s room, and the lady on the aisle might start to snore, and so on...

...Under such conditions, the subject of the book became almost irrelevant...

...Like how when Alan Shepard was sitting in the capsule waiting to blast off for America’s first manned space flight all he could think of was how badly he wanted to relieve himself (he ended up getting permission to do it in his suit...

...I’ve never heard anyone who wasn’t either a reporter or someone who dealt with reporters all the time, like a press aide, call someone else “a good reporter...

...Who would have thought that a book about Project Mercury-those first puny manned capsules that circled the earth, without space walks, dockings or moon landings-would be a big hit, a smash...

...The idea of the right stuff is a good one...

...it’s different, original-not the sort of thing most journalists would think to write about these days because, well, who wants to write about courage (especially a courage tinged with patriotism) in this day and age...

...You see Frank Borman, showing considerable Right Stuff by rebuilding the reputation of Eastern Airlines...

...TOM WOLFE at the keyboard Even space cowboys get the bluesbut you’d never know it from reading The Right StufJ: by Joseph Nocera Oh, that Tom Wolfe-he really did it this time, didn’t he...

...and shows as well the extent to which Tom Wolfe has helped explain “the whole business of ‘the way we live now’ ” (Tom Wolfe’s line)-and the extent to which he has not...

...But for all its subtlety and originality, the Right Stuff isn’t all that complicated an idea...

...More and more, these pieces were undisguised attacks on that world, the best example being the two-part article he wrote for the New York Herald Tribune in 1964 on the subject of The New Yorker...

...In a lot of other ways it’s like the Renaissance, too...

...So he dove right in, and when he finally emerged he not only had a solid grasp of the technical details of space travel, but a lot else tooall those terrific details that make the story so engrossing...

...If Wolfe had accepted this challenge, faced up to the reverse side of the astronaut’s courage, then The Right Stuff might have been a great book instead of a good one...

...As a journalist, that has always been his greatest strength-he could write in such an entertaining way that even when his subject was something you cared not a whit about (something like demolition derbies, for instance) he still had you hooked by the third paragraph...

...And so, when you read Wolfe, you will run across them time and again, these little doubts that pop into your mind, facts and arguments that don’t quite fit the theme...

...The reaction from The New Yorker family was vitriolic in the extreme: “puts the Herald Tribune right down in the gutter”-William Shawn...

...Wolfe hadn’t discovered the phrase yet, but he did have the general idea: “Within the fraternity of men who did this sort of thing day in and day out,” he wrote, “. . . mankind appeared to be sheerly divided between those who have it and those who don’t-although what it was...

...Tom Wolfe is one of those people (rare in the magazine world) who instead of writing around a hole in his narrative, Wolfe wants to fill it in...

...The idea here seems to be that since it is comparable to “art,” it must be important, significant (so pay attention...

...But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life...

...Doubts like these should have troubled Wolfe...

...as irresponsible as anything I have ever come upon outside the gutter press”-Richard Rovere...

...If you think about that person, you’ll remember that while your first impulse might have been to dismiss him as a swaggering fool, he did...

...But maybe not...

...And in explaining It, he writes: “As to what this ineffable quality was...

...stuff...

...And to come to terms with that, and even learn that it’s valuable, is an important step...

...As a result, one comes across some startling, bold-faced statements in these mid-1960s pieces...

...Maybe...

...There was one problem with Wolfe’s dichotomy right off...

...And then there is the final delicious irony, which is that once all the adulation came, space flight-previously regarded in the fraternity as being For Sissies-was magically transformed, and became a branch of the Right Stuff itself...

...A few years ago, Wolfe came out with a collection of essays called Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine...

...well, ineffable, but once the student sees it-really sees it-it goes from being impossible to grasp to being simplicity itself...

...In fact they were relieved that the men were finally getting into something less risky than test-piloting...

...Hadn’t Stephen Crane covered that...

...in his book and his articles that few other reporters were able to match...

...How does the John Glenn of The Right Stuff square with John Glenn the senator...

...well, it obviously involved bravery...

...In this case, however, 1 don’t think the criticism is unfair...

...What’s more-and what seems important for Wolfe’s book-is that, from what we know, the astronauts seem to have had this other side as well...

...Joseph Nocera is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The first, and simplest, is that a large part of Wolfe is the old-fashioned entertainer, the showmanright this way, dear readers, a thrill on every page, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back...

...A certain raw competence, or something...

...the creamy stuff you can use...

...When he was making his reputation as a writer, it ‘was by ignoring the world of New York and the high life...

...No quibbling...

...There was The Painted Word, which might be summarized by saying that nobody buys art because of an appreciation of art, only because of the dictates of fashion...

...but in conception, even (excuse me for saying it) in analysis...

...This fondness for Low Renters stemmed, I think, from his feeling that he was the one person who could see-really could see-that the rest of America out there in the mid-1960s was changing quickly...

...It fit so well, it made his narrative work so seamlessly, it was such a good way for him to thumb his nose at the prissy New York sophisticates...

...The Right Stufs is full of these kinds of stories, stories about the space program you had never read anywhere else before...

...Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality...

...Yet for all that, The Right Stuff falls short of being a great book...

...It’s not just the sort of thing people think about...

...On first reading, the Right Stuff theory works beautifully...

...When you look at the subsequent careers of the astronauts, you see a trail of troubled marriages, alcohol, emotional problems...

...He went out and discovered a world of hippies, demolition derbies, customized cars, test pilots, and people of that ilk...

...It is Glenn,for instance, who takes laps around the track in the morning, when the other six are still nursing hangovers...

...But it means Wolfe oversimplifies...

...Salinger...

...What’s more, he had been at the keyboard an awfully long time, so long that at some point in the year before it was finally finished, The Right Stuff had gone from being simply a book to being a bona-fide event-indeed, the kind of event publishers (in this case Farrar, Straus & Giroux) like best: the “long-awaited event...

...Though he was writing about the the Low Rent life, Wolfe’s audience was still New York...

...Even the critics couldn’t say enough good thingsabout this book...

...A lot of the concepts that eventually found their way into f i e Right Stuff showed up there, up to and including the righteous substance itself...

...Hadn’t The New Yorker, after all, printed some-no, a lot-of first-rate journalism over the years...

...What you have is something more like sculpture in the era of Benvenuto Cellini, when sculpture was always more tied up with religion and architecture...

...So there it was-it had something to do with courage, and ability, and to be honest, the specter of death hung over the whole enterprise (no wonder pilots didn’t want to talk about it)-and it also had to do with ambition and getting ahead...

...Full steam ahead...

...And when he wrote about the act of reporting-oh, did he wax poetic...

...He wrote paeans to reporting, odes to it...

...So if he was going to convince New York that these people he was writing about were important, he would have to attempt (especially when he first started doing this) to justify his subjects to his audience...

...something...

...but truly rich in complexity...

...It makes clear how silly the official Life-magazine-and- Walter-Cronkite version of the astronauts, with its emphasis on wholesomeness and bravery, was-for the space flights had nothing to do with what the astronauts really cared about, namely the Right Stuff...

...the idea of tramping around America doing interviews, gathering information and observing people could make him positively breathless...

...It is, as expected, a fun read...

...This is no underclass-the people in it have money to own a house and have a car or two...

...Wolfe mentions this possibility, mulls over it for all of two paragraphs...

...It is Glenn who takes himself too seriously, who sets the phony image of the God-fearing, clean-living astronaut...

...by comparison, another long-awaited event published last year, David Halberstam’s Ihe Powers That Be, is full of fits and starts, pages and pages of narrative that seems interminable...

...It just seems to flow along, ever so gracefully...

...Of course, everybody thought it would-knew it would-because Tom Wolfe was at the keyboard...

...But if you’re like me, and you think about that person some more, you’ll realize that there is another side to him, equally important to the full illumination of his character...

...For example, in Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Wolfe spends a lot of time comparing customized cars to Versailles, and the customizers to Picasso, Dali, and half a dozen other artists...

...Your high-school football coach, the guy down the street who joined the Air Force, the deal-making investment banker, somebody...

...Or if he did, it doesn’t show...

...Were the astronauts presented as being intrepid pilots...

...That was in 1974...

...Actually they were grumbling that space travel took no skill, that even a. monkey could do it, and secretly lobbying for the placement of manual controls in their capsules, so they couldfly the things...

...In fact, when he writes about himself he can be stunningly self-aggrandizing- the...

...but then you hear that when a pilot told the FAA about the conditions leading to an Eastern jet’s crash, Borman felt threatened and grounded him...

...But what’s noteworthy about Wolfe’s earlier essay is that it shows he had the concept well-formed, in his head, for at leastfour years-four years and he never asked himself what was wrong with it...

...And where were all the reporters who should have been covering this fascinating phenomenon...

...There were some good reasons for this, not the least of which was that Tom Wolfe is a terrific writer, so it was assumed that anything he was working on this long and hard would have to be fun to read...

...Everything fits...

...Bombs Away But the biggest problems came when you combined the love of the single clean theory, and the division of the world into . good (Low Rent) and bad (Cultureburg), with Wolfe’s otherwise admirable will to entertain, to hold his audience...

...So Wolfe, it is clear, came to feel nothing but scorn for high society...

...The other reason The Right Stuff was so anxiously awaited was that it was a book that required a lot of Good Old Fashioned Shoe Leather, of which Tom Wolfe is a master...

...you’re still combing the chaos for details...

...one of those books (and there haven’t been many this year) that you don’t want to put down once it finds its rhythm (which happens pretty early on...

...One of them-a former astronaut, in fact-got so carried away that he ended his review by proclaiming grandly that Tom Wolfe had...

...The New Yorker, of course, was one of the great sacred cows of Cultureburg (Wolfe’s word), an institution that in those days never-but neverfelt the sting of even the most muted criticism...

...A nice phrase, really, although not one destined to enter the language, as “the me decade” did, and “radical chic...

...It is, after all, an arresting concept, and an author is as entitled as a reader to be momentarily blinded by his own vision...

...A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids, made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep...

...For most people, I suspect that this sense that he was a great reporter (as opposed to being a great writer) was more intuitive than anything else...

...Wolfe then, goes to considerable lengths to describe It...

...Bombs away...

...not in the dig-it-up-and-write-it down sense (for who can do that better than Wolfe...

...It may seem unfair to criticize Wolfe for not writing about what might be wrong with his central idea about the astronauts...

...Stick to the story...

...Radical Chic-rich liberals are so full of guilt and so eager to be in style that they can be conned by Black Panthers...

...Why that horrible fiend who just threw the sapper bomb in the ballet master’s lap-was that a mishar or a bandana he had around his neck...

...inaccurate and sub-collegiate and gleefully and unrelievedly poisonous”- J.D...

...Oh, it works, and besides that it gives Wolfe a chance to continue his celebration of Low Rent...

...And, closer to the crux of the matter, hadn’t the Vietnam war made the kind of patriotic courage The Right Stuffwas about somewhat disreputable and out of fashion...

...If you had these doubts,you weren’t going to have them confirmed by Tom Wolfe...

...The idea seemed to be that any fool could throw away his life in the process...

...then it’s back to the attack...

...Maybe he has been a little on the wild side sometimes, what with all the dashes and dots and italics and exclamation points and all the other zany punctuation he made up (though this is greatly subdued in The Right Stuff), but even that was part of his charm...

...He probably felt that taking on the problems with his insight would inevitably have meant filling his book with qualifications and balancing paragraphs that would have at best gotten in the way-and at worst, lost the audience...

...and even a very funny description of what the ordeal was like for the chimps who preceded the astronauts into space...

...The rest was coaxed out of people from interviews...

...But this group is an underclass in the sense that New York, and the moneyed class in general, has always condescended to it...

...Money was changing America...

...have...

...Well, to Tom Wolfe’s way of thinking, they were still all stuck in New York, writing about their own little irrelevant world...

...Because when a writer acknowledges a flaw in his central idea, and turns it over in his mind long enough, he often finds a way to turn it to his advantage, to make it part of his story, to use it to strengthen his theory or to come up with a better, different idea, rather than a collection of qualifiers and balancers...

...This is not to say that the Right Stuff ranks up there with differential equations...

...It is a wonderful gift Tom Wolfe has, to be able to write that well, and of course, Tom Wolfe has never been reticent about pointing this out about himself...

...And that is the tendency of the person with the Right Stuff to be extremely uncomfortable with all the non-Right stuff aspects of life-emotional interaction...

...As of early February, his new book, n e Right Stuf, was heading toward its 16th week on The New York Times bestseller list-four solid months of best selling...

...The Kandy- Kolored Tangerine- Flake St reamline Baby-customized cars as the great American art form...

...What a hit...

...it’sjust that once you get it figured out, the right stuff is simplicity itself...

...Once you lose an audience, you can’t get it back...

...one got the impression at times that Wolfe could have been toiling away on a telephone book and it still would have been a long-awaited event...

...classic example being his 52- page introduction to The New Journalism, a collection of articles he edited in 1973- but that doesn’t make it any less true...

...He finds his subject matter and his one catchy idea around which to organize it, and he’s off...

...Because when you put all this together, as a writer, you come up with a potent disincentive to looking at the holes in your argument, at what might be a little wrong or a little inaccurate with your neat, iconoclastic idea...

...At the same time, when Wolfe turned his attention to the world of New York, he was increasingly tough, hostile, and even mean-spirited...

...At the same time, he came to embrace, with equal fervor, the proles who inhabited the world of (in his phrase) Low Rent...

...Through most of The Right Stuff, he makes his narrative work by telling the story through the eyes of the protagonist-a wonderfully effective device, but one that locks him into accepting the protagonist’s own perceptions, blind spots included...

...So it, more than his other books, shows the limits of “that wonderful Wolfe style machine” (The London Sunday Ernes’ line...

...it was more that the middle class was so much more affluent than it had ever been...

...He is weakened by his fear of the appearance of weakness...

...He was a member of the fraternity-a True Brother...

...what was most remarkable about that book was that with all its great descriptions and its details and anecdotes, Wolfe himself had been present for very little of what he described-only the last few chapters, really...

...You have to admit it, if you think about it...

...Hardly...

...There was therefore a certain inevitability about an attack on it from Wolfe, and he lived up to expectations...

...He got these people to tell him just about everything, down to what they were thinking at certain moments, down to what it felt like to take acid-a massive and impressive feat of reconstruction reporting...

...Usually they are small, and you don’t dwell on them as you are swept away in the rush of Wolfe’s prose...

...No way...

...On both counts-writing and reporting- The Right Stuff turned out to have been worth the wait...

...They do not, in fact, lack for much materially...

...Wasn’t LSD regarded, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to the contrary, as extremely dangerous by even the most devoted of drug abusers...

...They loved it...

...Thinking about the roots of this onesimple- idea phenomenon, two explanations occurred to me...

...Were Wolfe to stop and say in his own voice, well wait a sec, this point’s going to take a little more explaining...

...It’s the step Wolfe makes...

...No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment-and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every day...

...sincerity, admission of failureeven when a mastery of those aspects could make him actually more blindingly competent and in control...

...But today, as a senator, Glenn isn’t exactly the kind of person Wolfe makes him out to be...

...If that admirable quality called the Right Stuff is somehow linked to other qualities that aren’t so desirable, then maybe we shouldn’t be promoting the Frank Bormans to positions of power and authority on the basis of their one ineffable virtue...

...In reading back through most of Tom Wolfe’s previous books, I kept coming back to this: he finds an idea...

...You never get that slogging-through feeling in The Right As for the reporting, well, it’s clear enough that once he became interested in the astronauts and Project Mercury, Wolfe wanted to know everything...

...What a scene this is going to make...

...He’s a prissy, pushy little press-hound doing ostentatious little things to show off...

...was never explained...

...Mostly, I admire this-it’s a rare pleasure to find a journalist who has an actor’s anxiety level about whether he’s holding his audience’s attention...

...Those undesirable qualities might turn out to be-who knows?-as important in the story of the astronauts as the idea of the Right Stuff itself...

...In effect, the rest of the profession, being more interested in, say, which mid-level official had his hand in the cookie jar, had ceded the courage beat to Wolfe...

...or about how John Glenn was struck by his sense of disappointment at what the world looked like below as he was orbiting around it (it was decidedly not the awesome sight he and everyone else had expected, and when he radioed to earth that he was awed, it was done only to fulfill the world’s expectations...

...There is not much doubt that Wolfe went into that project with every intention of emerging with, as they say in the trade, a hatchet job...

...As he put it once, with characteristic immodesty: “Saturation Reporting, as I think of it, can be one of the most exhilarating trips, as they say, in the world...

...They didn’t talk about it to their wives, or to each other, even at those moments when they were drunk enough to let their hair down in most other respects...

...Low-Rent Cellini The second reason is that Wolfe seems to have a theory about his own life as a magazine writer, which he imposes on all his work...